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Osceola

1804–1838 · 34 years Specialist

A Creek refugee who became the Seminoles' most stubborn defender

Portrait of Osceola — George Catlin — 1838 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Osceola was born Billy Powell around 1804 in a Creek town on the Tallapoosa River, in what is now Alabama, to a mother of mixed Muscogee and European descent -- who his father was is not settled, though family accounts point to a Scottish trader. In 1814, after the Red Stick Creeks lost their war against Andrew Jackson's forces, the family fled south into Spanish Florida and joined the Seminole. He was still a boy in 1818 when Jackson's troops burned the village he was living in. He grew up watching the United States take Florida by treaty in 1821 and then push to remove the people who lived there, and by his twenties had taken the name Asi Yaholo, earned through his role at the Green Corn ceremony.

Osceola refused to accept the 1832 Treaty of Payne's Landing, which committed the Seminole to removal west of the Mississippi, and became the resistance's most visible leader even though he held no formal chieftainship. Indian agent Wiley Thompson jailed him briefly in 1835 for his defiance. On December 28 of that year, Osceola shot and killed Thompson outside Fort King, the same day Seminole fighters wiped out a column of more than one hundred U.S. soldiers in what became known as the Dade Massacre. Both attacks opened the Second Seminole War. For nearly two years Osceola led guerrilla raids from the swamps, avoiding open battle and outlasting a war that would eventually cost the United States more money and more soldiers' lives than any other conflict with a Native nation before the Civil War.

On October 21, 1837, Osceola rode into a meeting near St. Augustine under a white flag, at the invitation of General Joseph Hernandez acting on orders from General Thomas Jesup. Jesup had him and roughly eighty followers seized on the spot. The capture violated the truce that brought them there, and historians have described it as one of the more shameful episodes in the U.S. Army's record. Imprisoned first at Fort Marion and then at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, Osceola died there on January 30, 1838, weakened by chronic malaria and an untreated throat infection. His physician, Dr. Frederick Weedon, removed his head after death and kept it, later displaying it in his drugstore window and, by some accounts, using it to frighten his own children -- against Osceola's dying request to be buried in Florida.

The Second Seminole War dragged on five more years and never produced the clean victory the United States wanted -- a core of Seminole families held out in the Everglades and signed no treaty, a fact their descendants still cite. Osceola became one of the most commemorated Native names in American geography: counties in Florida, Iowa and Michigan, a national forest, a New Hampshire mountain, towns in half a dozen states, most nowhere near where he set foot. Florida State University's mascot bears his name, adopted with the Seminole Tribe of Florida's approval in 1978. His skull, last in a private New York collection, was reported destroyed in an 1866 fire, and no remains were ever returned to Florida.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Osceola's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Killing of Wiley Thompson other
The act that, alongside the Dade Massacre, opened the Second Seminole War 1835
Second Seminole War resistance campaign other
Guerrilla leadership that helped make the war the costliest U.S.-Native conflict before the Civil War 1837
Refusal of the Treaty of Payne's Landing other
His refusal to accept Seminole removal became the resistance's organizing position 1832

Life in brief

with age at each point

c. 1804 aged ~0 Born Billy Powell on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama
1814 aged ~10 Family flees to Spanish Florida after the Creek defeat in the Red Stick War
1818 aged ~14 Andrew Jackson's forces burn the village he is living in during the First Seminole War
1832 aged ~28 Refuses to accept the Treaty of Payne's Landing, committing the Seminole to removal
December 28, 1835 aged ~31 Kills Indian agent Wiley Thompson at Fort King, opening the Second Seminole War The same day, Seminole fighters destroyed a U.S. Army column in the Dade Massacre.
October 21, 1837 aged ~33 Seized under a flag of truce near St. Augustine on General Thomas Jesup's orders
January 30, 1838 aged ~34 Dies a prisoner at Fort Moultrie, Charleston, South Carolina His physician removed his head after death.
1842 aged ~38 The Second Seminole War ends without a treaty from the Seminole who remained in Florida
1978 Florida State University adopts his name for its mascot with the Seminole Tribe of Florida's approval